ABSTRACT

This chapter expresses that the act of "bearing witness" that pervades literature today has nothing to do with the huge, encroaching mountain of testimonials. Among literature's "bearers of witness", Patrick Modiano plays an undeniably important role. In his stories Modiano introduces written objects that form part of police inquiries and owe much to what Carlo Ginzburg calls the evidential paradigm. The reason to construct an enigma that is gradually unraveled through the discernment of traces left behind is not to resolve a mystery—we are not "historians" here—but to create an atmosphere. Urban writing preserves a memory that Modiano restores by describing the way it was forged and the way it appears today: what it provokes when one encounters it. Modiano carefully details each of these inscriptions in the urban space, and thereby sets up a precise typology with which to distinguish those objects by medium— paper, cardboard, wooden plank, marble plaque, wall, window— and especially by letter and type of inscription.